Categorie: code

When you think about hackathons and coders building something quick and dirty, you might envision a dark dorm room at Harvard filled with pizza boxes and empty Red Bull cans. That’s because the only window the world has, outside of San Francisco and New York City, was the movie “The Social Network.” A non-profit organization called Code.org has launched today to change the perception of all of this, with the goal of making computer science and programming accessible for everyone. When I say everyone, I don’t mean everyone who wants to code, I really mean everyone. I spoke to Code.org’s founder, Hadi Partovi, yesterday, about where he thinks the massive gaps in learning how to code came from and what we can do as a society to change all of it. He told me “It’s a challenge that our country needs to face.” Some of these gaps are because schools don’t treat computer science the way it should be, and furthermore, don’t recognize coding as an essential skill, like reading and writing is. Partovi has taken this on as his personal goal, as well as the goal of Code.org. Partovi has some amazing experience in the field, having been on the founding teams of iLike and Tellme, as well as investing in and advising companies like Facebook, Dropbox and Airbnb. Having studied this myself and living in this industry, I’ve received the fruits of one of the best things to study and the world is being turned on its head because of software. Jobs are growing, industries are being turned upside down and our school system is acting in the opposite direction. It’s difficult to convince someone who is going for one of the highest paying jobs in the world to take one of the lowest. Yes, working for a startup might not be the biggest monkey-maker and this has something to do with college students going down a separate path. However, if everyone was able to code just a little bit, imagine all of the great ideas that might just get off of the ground simply because the person who came up with it didn’t have to wonder how to get started. As we dug around a bit about Partovi’s undertaking, we learned that since Mark Zuckerberg is someone people aspire to be, at least when it comes to building something that you’re passionate about and following through on